School board training effects on student achievement

Issue and Purpose In the age of accountability and high stakes testing, school boards cannot simply be a representative body of the community; they must be functional governing bodies with effective trustees that hold the district accountable for student results. Public school board members can positively influence student achievement by acting within their policy and accountability roles and creating a positive district culture of learning. Likewise, providing school board members with quality training opportunities could help board members understand and appreciate the power of their policy and accountability functions and help dissuade them from delving into administrative functions that distract from districts goals. For this reason, pinpointing exactly how board governance training changes behavior and which board actions impact district and school site culture merits additional research and evaluation. Along this vein, the purpose of this study is to discover whether school board actions, specifically completing governance training, have any quantifiable influence on student achievement in their districts. Scope, Limitations, Procedures In order to test this question, I used data from all 1,000 school districts in California for 2003, 2005, and 2007 and a pooled data set of all three years and performed multiple regression analyses to control for a variety of student, social, school site, and district administrative factors. I compiled district data for this study from the following sources: the California Department of Education, EdData, and the California School Boards Association. It is important to note that this study uses district level data, including district API scores and is therefore not measuring the affect of school board training on an individual student's achievement. This is significant because some factors that may be important at the site or individual child level may be somewhat different from those factors found to have the greatest impact on the system/district as a whole. One important limitation was the availability of usable data. To perform a regression analysis, all factors must be held constant, meaning every district must have available data for all of the independent variables chosen. In the four data sets, after controlling for each of the 20 independent variables chosen, only 393, 506, 578 and 342 districts remained for the 2003, 2005, 2007, and pooled data set respectively, notably the 342 districts in the pooled data set actually represent 1029 individual observations. The explanatory variables chosen for this regression model cover aggregate student ethnicity data, income, parent education level, special student needs, teacher and classroom variables, financial and administrative variables, and lastly school board variables on ethnicity, board consistency and board training. Results and Recommendations My results conform to previous literature in that the student and social inputs have the most significant impact on student achievement, followed by school site and teacher inputs coming as a close second. My results also indicate that some district administrative variables have a small but significant impact on district achievement. In regards to my key explanatory variables, individual and team training, I found that there was not a statistically significant relationship between board training and achievement at the district level, but that there is a statistically significant relationship between board consistency and district results. Board consistency with its limitations from the available data has room to become a much more important area of study and possible connection between board training and district achievement, where completing board training results in longevity and stability on the board, which in turn improves district results. My results also indicate a need additional research on district climate and culture, a variable I could not measure but has been shown in previous literature to link board actions to district results. Due to the limitations of the data and need for future research, I detail some recommendations for the California School Boards Association that can help fix current data limitations and also help the association build its research capacity and agenda for the future.